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victordiaz / PHONK

PHONK is a coding playground for new and old Android devices
https://phonk.app
GNU General Public License v3.0
460 stars 25 forks source link

Update the JS interpreter with something more modern #4

Open victordiaz opened 5 years ago

victordiaz commented 5 years ago

Phonk uses Mozilla Rhino interpreter to execute the scripts as it binds very easily with Java. Although it works quite nicely, it feels a bit old. There is no support of ES6 among other things.

Maybe somebody with experience out there? :)

victordiaz commented 4 years ago

I did some experiments using J2V8 and realized it would need a lot of effort to change it from Mozilla Rhino.

I think for now is not worth the time, so I close the issue.

victordiaz commented 4 years ago

Apparently theres is another interpreter that interfaces with Java as well https://github.com/graalvm/graaljs

marclava commented 4 years ago

It doesn't look like GrallJS (community version) is available for Android: https://github.com/graalvm/graalvm-ce-builds/releases/tag/vm-20.1.0 But maybe it doesn't have to, I'm not a Java programmer...

Also, maybe Nashorn would be a good option (even if deprecated in JDK11): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashorn_(JavaScript_engine) https://docs.oracle.com/javase/9/nashorn/JSNUG.pdf https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Nashorn/Rhino+Migration+Guide

dzfranklin commented 4 years ago

What about using Babel to transpile modern JavaScript to ES5? I think that's how greasemonkey solves this problem. Babel-standalone (https://babeljs.io/docs/en/babel-standalone) can run on a JavaScript interpreter and transform modern JavaScript into older JavaScript

victordiaz commented 4 years ago

@danielzfranklin that sounds very interesting. I thought babel could only run using node but the standalone version could do the work!

I'd be happy to include it if it works

victordiaz commented 4 years ago

I did a small test yesterday I couldn't use babel-standalone. When I load the library Rhino is kinda happy about it but then I dont see the Babel object instantiated. Researching a bit in the internet, I did not find any person using it with Rhino :/

Piroro-hs commented 4 years ago

How about using Babel on the web-editor side? It works perfectly on modern browsers.

victordiaz commented 4 years ago

@Piroro-hs That's a quite interesting idea. I'm wondering if it will become more difficult to share scripts among people, since you always have to transpile it with the Web Editor...

Maybe a good compromise is to be able to write a main.js.es6 in the editor. Then the editor using Babel will send the transpiled "main.js" to the device, so everything will be normal from the perspective of the app.